Light a Fire

Whether a hand-poured candle or with the help of a high-tech device, consumers can create a personalized environment.

LAFCO has been making luxury candles for a quarter century.

Diptyque’s New York Candle generated plenty of buzz before it hit counters last month.

Chesapeake Bay Candle has added a new “coffee table jar” candle.

Yankee Candle channels the season with a favorite ingredient—pumpkin.

Meditation expert Calm.com has created a new Sleep Mist that has lavender and other essential oils.

Christine Esposito, Associate Editor09.01.17

For many years now, the scents offered by home fragrance companies have become more sophisticated, and the same is happening to the mechanisms by which they are dispensed. Existing brands are refreshing their look with an eye on home décor, and tech is seeping into the space, too, thanks to companies using connected devices and smartphone apps to deliver scent. Across the board, venerable brands and startups are looking to ignite passion among consumers who spent an estimated $6.5 billion on home fragrance last year.

“In 2016, the home fragrances market recorded solid growth of 2.1%, with unique product designs and sophisticated fragrances at the core of the growth, and 2017 looks promising as well,” said Karen Doskow, director, consumer products, at Kline.

According to Doskow, while mass is the heavyweight in the category overall, premium brands are the ones to watch these days.

“Luxury players remain the market movers today, and the indie brands like Nest, Diptyque, and Voluspa are really the standout performers. While the mass trade class remains the key contributor of market sales, there has been a genuine appetite for these niche and unique products that the luxury brands offer. Consumers are drawn to their vibrant new product activity and decorative and elaborate designs. It goes beyond the fragrance aspect to a piece of home décor,” she said.

Jon Bresler, president and founder of luxury brand LAFCO, echoed that sentiment.

“Fragrance, especially in the luxury market, is more than just about scenting a home: it’s about setting a mood, both with look and scent. A LAFCO candle or room diffuser, with its hand-blown glass vessel is an art piece, and I believe we have an extensive library of complex, interesting and modern fragrances that help create a unique environment,” he said.

New York-based LAFCO, which has been around for a quarter century, recently refreshed its look, added a new three-wick candle size and updated its packaging with a minimalistic box and label that better demonstrates the brand’s “Pure Promise” ethos.

“We consider ourselves pioneers in the luxury fragrance market, but as a 25-year old company, we wanted to refocus on our brand’s values, our Pure Promise is our commitment to consumers. Our new design makes it abundantly clear that we are a fragrance company and that we are committed to offering the highest quality product with the purest ingredients. Consumers have always loved the LAFCO experience, and I think this new look helps educate them why, before they even burn a candle or try a hand soap,” Bresler told Happi.

Products produced by indie and niche brands are garnering much of the attention these days—and some have even enjoyed pre-launch buzz usually reserved for more trendy products like color cosmetics. Take for example, Diptyqye. Social media posts and news stories were breaking well ahead of the Aug. 1 launch of its New York City candle. The company’s third US city-exclusive candle, it has accords of woods cedar, vetiver and patchouli and waxy tobacco and is stored in a glass vessel that was inspired by the “fascinating and muffled atmosphere of the city at night.”

And there’s reason to expect even tougher competition for coveted candle dollars as long-time home fragrance veteran Harry Slatkin is back on QVC with a new line called HomeWorx.

“Harry Slatkin is truly a legend in the world of fragrance and has mastered the art of transforming the home through the power of scent,” Ken O’Brien, senior vice president of merchandising for QVC said when the new line was announced. “Our customers have long been awaiting Harry’s return, and they are undoubtedly as excited to welcome Harry back to the QVC family as we are.”

The HomeWorx by Harry Slatkin collection, which debuted in late July, features an assortment of highly fragranced, real-flame candles, pillars and tapers, diffusers, fragrance warmers, wax melts and gift sets. All products are infused with the lush notes and scents that made the Slatkin brand famous, according to QVC.

“It will be interesting to see how this new venture contributes to the market’s overall performance for the year,” Doskow said about Slatkin’s new line.

True fragrance fanatics are equally excited about a project underway that won’t debut for more than a year. In June Ikea announced an initiative with scent expert Ben Gorham of Byredom. Products from Ikea-Gorham collaboration—which aims to “look into both the role of scent in the home, the carriers and the products as well as exploring innovation in scents”—are expected out in 2019.

Falling for Fragrance

Across the board, companies in the home fragrance space are enlisting strategies that include NPD heavily influenced by both home décor and lifestyle trends.

According to Jennifer Genson, senior management, fragrance development at Yankee Candle, consumers want a fragrance that “will make them feel in the moment.”

What’s also trending, she said, are “unexpected blends of fragrance notes that have a comforting familiarity, as well as touch of surprise. Together they create a new scent experience that feels relevant today.”

“Yankee Candle is the leader in curating scents, and consumers can always count that we get our fragrances right every time,” said Genson.

Creating products that capture the essence of the season is also essential at Chesapeake Bay Candle, which is owned by Pacific Trade International. For Fall, the brand is bringing back its best-selling Pumpkin Latte and Chestnut Acorn scents as well as the best-selling fragrances from its Heritage Collection in an extended variety of formats.

Introduced to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Pacific Trade International, the Heritage Collection has become one of its most popular product lines, according to company officials. Five seasonal fragrances (which include Balsam Fir, Cinnamon Spice and Vanilla Biscotti) will be available as large and small glass jar candles and double wick tin candles. Seasonal scents will be available in a new “coffee table jar” candle. Just like the name implies, this new format is designed to sit on the homeowner’s coffee table as a statement piece.

Beyond home décor, PTI is expanding its Chesapeake Bay Mind & Body Collection, an assortment of candles and home fragrances inspired by the growing wellness lifestyle trend.

“With the rise of the new technologies our lives have become super organized. But we are not happier. We need to slow down and find time for ourselves,” noted Mei Xu, co-owner and CEO of Chesapeake Bay Candle. “I wanted to design a home fragrance collection that helps people to achieve a state of balance and peace inside, so they can share their joy and energy with others. http://search.hgomaps.co/?uid=f555cb50-7ea7-47bb-9268-1c39735d381b&uc=20170811&ap=appfocus1&source=googlemaps-googledisplay-v12&page=homepage&implementation_id=maps_4.0.3The Chesapeake Bay Mind & Body brand invites you to pause, to find a moment of stillness and to enjoy the simple pleasure of fragrance.”

Companies continue to enhance the dispensing methods that deliver home fragrance too.

Gold Canyon International last month rolled out Scent Cube—a portable unit that it contends is compact in size but big in fragrance delivery thanks to new pads that provide flexibility in scenting strengths from subtle to robust.

“We love Scent Cube because it provides customers with an easy, flameless option for personalizing and making any environment special,” said Elissa Shuck, director of product and merchandising, at Gold Canyon, Phoenix, AZ.

In development for more than a year, Scent Cube, she said “is a major step because we reject new technology developments more often than launch them. When we launch something new, it is because it meets our very high standard for maintaining our authentic fragrance character as well as strength and scent throw.”

Competitor Scentsy seems to be taking similar tack with its own portable system called Scentsy Go. Rechargeable with customizable LED lighting, the newly launched unit—which is about the size of a soda can—comes in silver or trendy rose gold. Inside, a fan blows air through Scentsy’s pods that come in 15 different fragrances like Coconut Lemongrass, Vanilla Bean Buttercream, Baked Apple Pie, Weathered Leather and Christmas Cottage.

The Tech Connection

Home fragrance devices—like the homes in which they are being used—are getting more high-tech and connected.

Take Calm, a California-based company that is pushing tech into the scent space—or maybe it’s the other way around? Founded in 2012, Calm offers a subscription-based meditation app and web platform; it boasts more 11 million downloads to date and an average of 20,000 new users daily. The San Francisco-based company recently rolled out its first physical product, Sleep Mist ($29.99), a special blend of lavender and other essential oils that users spritz on their pillow to aid sleep while listening to a bedtime story (commissioned by Calm) on their smartphone.

Calm said it tested more than 1,000 formulations before arriving at the final blend of notes, which also include frankincense, chamomile and clary sage.

“We went to extraordinary lengths to get every detail exactly right, even testing our prototypes on 12 different pillow cases to help create the most peaceful and restful night’s sleep imaginable,” said Calm’s Alexander Will, who created Sleep Mist.

“Insomnia is a huge global issue with over 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills being written annually in the US alone,” said Michael Acton Smith, co-founder/co-CEO of Calm. “Mixing scent with storytelling is a powerful and natural way to help racing minds drift off to sleep.”

Calm is not the only company on this path; “smart” fragrance delivery products include Sensorwake’s Oria (a bedside device that uses fragrances designed by Givaudan to help users fall asleep and stay asleep) and Prolitec’s Aera, which scents an entire room and is controlled by a smart phone.

Yet, even as the world becomes more high-tech, there’s something to be said about what’s tried and true.

“As transformative as technology can be in other industries, there is something to be said for the ritual of lighting a candle and the intangibles that it brings,” said Bresler of LAFCO. “We rely on artisanal production methods, perfected in European apothecaries over centuries, because we believe in the superiority of a pure, hand-made product.

That’s not to say that we are old-fashioned! Especially in the scents that we create, we rely on modern sensibilities and complexities, but ultimately, we’re about creating an experience, and I don’t see an app being able to do that in the same way that a LAFCO candle can.”

Refreshing the Air Freshener Category

• Home air freshener sales at US multi-outlets fell 1.38% to $1.95 billion for the 52 weeks ended July 9, 2017, according to IRI. SC Johnson, maker of Glade, leads the category, ahead of Reckitt and Procter & Gamble. Of the big three, only P&G was able to post a gain (3.18%), based on IRI data.

P&G has amped up the odor squashing and aesthetic qualities of Febreze with new Febreze One. Available in Bamboo, Orchid and Mandarin fragrance variants, it offers the same odor elimination as other Febreze products but Flairosol sprayer technology allows Febreze One to produce an ultra-fine mist without dyes, heavy perfumes or aerosols, according to P&G.
The range, which launched at Target and Walmart in January, will soon be rolled out fully across the US, according to Mandy Ciccarella, communications manager at Procter & Gamble.

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